What 130,000 board games say about our society

The depths of human depravity rarely look as harmless as they do in games. In board games, we block and bluff, thwart plans, drive others into penury and break alliances – none of which would really be acceptable in real life. Nevertheless, once the game is over, no one really need fear, feel embarrassed or obliged to justify his or her actions. That's why board games are so interesting from a cultural perspective. After all, they reveal the types of conflict, community, achievement and imagination that we allow ourselves to explore through play.

Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, one of the 20th century's most influential cultural historians, based his cultural theory on play. In his book "Homo Ludens", published in 1938, he put forward the hypothesis that play is not merely a part of culture, but its very origin (1). Huizinga saw it as a safe space in which new cultural developments could be tried out.

In this respect, the Game of the Year award is an important cultural benchmark. Every year, the world’s most prestigious accolade for board games shows which forms of play – and thus which themes, values and social practices – are currently popular. In 2026, the award went to "Dito!"; a party game in which the aim is to guess other players’ word associations as accurately as possible.

However, a single award-winner is merely a snapshot in time. To identify longer-term trends in board games, it's therefore worth looking at broader data. To this end, I took a closer look at the figures in the world’s largest board-game database, BoardGameGeek (BGG), which contains more than 130,000 titles (2). The data reveals four trends that are also reflected in our society:

1: Your opponent is no longer at the table with you

Game of the Year by game mechanism (1979-2026)

If you go down the list of Game of the Year winners from the last half century or so, you notice that cooperative games are a surprisingly recent phenomenon (3). For decades, games were predominantly competitive, with each player pitted against everyone else, one winner and many losers. The historic turning point came in 2013 with "Hanabi"; a card game in which players collaborate to create the most spectacular fireworks display possible. By honouring "Dito!", the 2026 jury has opted for a non-cooperative game for the first time in a long while. Even so, it justified its choice – almost apologetically – by stressing the aspects that connect: "At first glance, 'Dito!' is a competition to see who can score the most points. However, at its core, it unites the players as a group because it is only by correctly recognising commonalities that we ourselves can succeed. At the same time, we also get to know our fellow players better."(4)

According to the BGG data, prior to 2013, less than 5% of the new games released were collaborative. This year, they accounted for almost 20% of the total. And although only 6% of all of the games listed in the BGG database are collaborative, 22 of them rank in the game platform’s top 100.

This trend points to a clear shift in values in board games. For a long time, the dominant board-game model was regulated competition, i.e. winning by making other players lose. Monopoly, UNO, Risk and Ludo are well-known examples of this conflict-oriented approach. Collaborative games operate in a fundamentally different way. Your opponent is no longer the person sitting at the same table, but a common task. This is in keeping with a society that increasingly views key issues as collective challenges. The need for cooperation isn't replacing competition altogether. But it is clearly becoming more culturally appealing.

2: Board games for one

A shift in attitudes can also be seen when looking at the newest games that can be played solo. Some board games are thus breaking away from their own prerequisite: playing with others. Almost half of the games released thus far in 2026 are designed such that they can be played both as a group and alone. Some are even designed specifically as pure single-player games. This doesn’t mean that people no longer want to play with others. Rather, it shows that it's become harder to find time to spend together. The number of single-person households is increasing (5). Friends live further apart, working hours are more flexible, leisure time is more disjointed and meet-ups need to be planned more often (6). Solo games are a response to these conditions. As a result, board games don't depend on whether the right number of people happen to be free at the same time.  

3: Analogue is becoming popular because the digital realm is becoming cluttered

Board games are analogue products. That's precisely why they're so popular. They must be ready to use from the outset, with no subsequent updates that make up for gaps in the rules or missing materials.

This quality is being appreciated more and more, precisely because it's becoming ever rarer in the digital world. Whereas the design standards for board games have risen steadily over the decades, the opposite is often the case in the digital world, with unfinished releases that are only improved via post-launch patches, paid additional content that used to be included by default in the basic version of the game, and micro-transactions that generate ongoing costs. Activist Cory Doctorow, a speaker at a GDI event held in the spring, coined the term "Enshittification" to encapsulate this creeping decline in the quality of digital products. His term describes the systematic deterioration of digital platforms, with the user experience being replaced by profit motives.

This contrasting trend can also be seen in the shift in ratings: between 2000 and 2023, the average user ratings for board games on BoardGameGeek rose from about 6.0 to 7.2, while the average Metacritic user rating for video games fell from approximately 7.6 to 6.8 (7).

4: Escaping reality

While wars and geopolitical conflicts are ever-present in the real world, the desire to re-enact them at the kitchen table has declined significantly. Until about 2012, war-themed games still accounted for almost 20% of the new releases listed on BGG. By 2024, this figure had fallen to 8%. 

Over the same period, the percentage of fantasy, space and sci-fi-themed games soared from about 16% to almost 27% in 2024, accompanied by a parallel rise in animal and nature-themed games, the proportion of which rose less than 6% to more than 14%. There thus appears to be a clear trend away from our own conflict-ridden reality and towards worlds that are intentionally alien, fictional or non-human.

Board games as a reflection of society

These four trends show that our game-playing is becoming more collaborative, solitary, analogue and escapist than was the case just ten years ago. We are using board games to hone our ability to solve problems jointly; a skill that is becoming increasingly important given collective challenges like the climate crisis. At the same time, we are seeking greater reliability in an increasingly unreliable digital world, as well as an escape from a reality that fewer and fewer people are keen to re-enact at the kitchen table. "Homo Ludens" was clearly right: show me how a society plays, and I’ll show you what’s currently on its mind.